


It Conquers All

by Mercurie



Category: Ancient History RPF, Classical Greece and Rome History & Literature RPF, Historical RPF, Original Work
Genre: Gods, Horror, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Romance, Wordcount: 100-1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-23
Updated: 2015-10-23
Packaged: 2018-04-27 17:15:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5057080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mercurie/pseuds/Mercurie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their love defies death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Conquers All

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PlinytheYounger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlinytheYounger/gifts).



Dawn is a resurrection, and like every birth, painful. For a long hour I lie with slow tears slipping from my eyes as the sun creeps across my couch. I could cry aloud, and my slaves would come running, only to stop in fear at the threshold. I am more terrible now even than I was before; and before I was already the most powerful man in the world.

I rise when I can move. When I am ready, my chamberlain accompanies me to the temple. It was the first of its kind, dedicated here on the grounds of my own villa. Last night's body has already been laid on the altar, its back bent as if it has fallen from a great height. Blood still oozes down the marble flutes.

They are all boys, youths so beautiful I must admire them even in death. That is how he chooses them. 

I look up into the face of the cruel god I have made. The statue is very like him – Antinous, the most beautiful of all youths – but not like, for it is cold and eternal, and in its likeness-yet-unlikeness to the human it is despair itself. Gazing on his pure features the thick shadow of the love that still grips me (I cannot escape it) rolls and turns over; like Antinous, my love has become human-and-inhuman, stranger and more fearsome.

"How long will you punish me?" I ask. 

The statue has a curve to its lips that could be a smile. I have no memory of commissioning the sculptor to carve a smile into the image, yet there they are, all of them all over my empire: knowing, smug, blind. A god sees everything except human suffering. 

"What was his name?" I ask the chamberlain. He doesn't know. Was the boy a Roman, a foreigner? Patrician or plebeian? Happy or melancholic? They are of every nation and kind, these boys Antinous sacrifices to me. Their only commonality is their loveliness. No one sees how they come, but every morning a new body is found here at dawn. Their death for my life: the logic of the god.

This Antinous, this idol and god of resurrection I shaped out of my hubris and vainglory that could not let my own boy go where mortals must go, die as mortals must die; for I wished my own love to be the one that would conquer death. And so it has. A hundred times I have died – I am old, my heart has stopped, my brain has bled; I am not without honour, I have slit my veins and fallen on my sword to spare these boys their sacrifice – and a hundred times Antinous has returned my wandering soul to this tired body and paid another over to Hades instead. 

The statue smiles down on me. To be beloved of a god is not the same as to be beloved of a man.

"What must I do?" I whisper for the hundredth time. I receive no answer. In the god's eyes eternity is reflected. As I have given him immortality, so he has given it me. Behold the works of love.


End file.
